Eric Edelman–a former undersecretary of defense in the Bush administration, an aide to Vice President Cheney, and one of the most respected foreign policy hands in Washington–wrote that the July 7 meeting in Hamburg between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was the most disastrous superpower summit since John F. Kennedy met Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. That Cold War-era summit emboldened the Soviets to put up the Berlin Wall and send missiles to Cuba, thus bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. It’s a harsh judgment, but its essential accuracy is being confirmed by what we have learned since July 7.

Trump appears proud of the fact that he actually raised with Putin the issue of Russian meddling in the U.S. election. But the way he did so engenders no confidence. According to Edelman, “Tillerson is reported to have told associates privately that he was stunned that the president opened the discussion by saying ‘I’m going to get this out of the way,’ in effect signaling his lack of seriousness about the issue.”

Trump’s own account is hardly more reassuring. On July 12, on his way back to Europe, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One: “I said to [Putin], were you involved with the meddling in the election? He said, absolutely not. I was not involved. He was very strong on it. I then said to him again, in a totally different way, were you involved with the meddling. He said, I was not–absolutely not.” Having failed to extract a confession from Putin, Trump then moved on to talking about Syria. What else can you do, he told reporters—“end up in a fist fight”?

What Trump should have done—what any other president would have done—was not ask Putin whether he did something that the U.S. intelligence community knows he did. The president should have said, “We know you did this—and here are the consequences.” Only Trump himself won’t publicly accept that Russia was the sole hacker, and he’s not interested in meting out any consequences. Indeed, his administration is lobbying to water down in the House a Russia-sanctions bill approved by the Senate.

One of the summit achievements that Trump trumpeted initially was an agreement to form with Russia an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, [and] many other negative things, will be guarded and safe.” This fox-guarding-the-hen-house proposal was met with such universal derision that within hours Trump disowned the idea, shortly after his Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin had loyally praised it on TV.

But Trump is still standing by the other summit take away, which was the announcement of a limited ceasefire in southwestern Syria. “We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives,” Trump tweeted. “Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!”

In point of fact, the agreement between the U.S. and Russia did nothing more than ratify a unilateral truce announced the previous week by the Syrian government in this area so that Bashar Assad could focus his hard-pressed forces on other parts of the country. The truce is unlikely to hold for long, but it is already being met with considerable concern in Israel, since the territory in question borders the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights and the land of Israel’s ally, Jordan.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out in stark terms against the ceasefire on Sunday, breaking with Trump to do so, because the Israeli security establishment is worried that the ceasefire will allow Iran and its Hezbollah proxies to consolidate their control of this strategically important land.

This development highlights the tension between Trump’s anti-Iran policy (his national security adviser at the time, Mike Flynn, put Iran “on notice” in February) and his more accommodating stance toward Iran’s ally, Russia. Contrary to what Rex Tillerson naively says, Russia does not have the same interests in Syria as the U.S. does. Russia is in Syria to consolidate Bashar Assad’s rule—not to fight ISIS or other Sunni terrorist groups, except insofar as they pose a danger to Assad’s rule.

To achieve its aims in Syria, Russia is working hand-in-glove with Iran, which remains Assad’s most important sponsor. Iran’s goal is to create a new Iranian sphere of influence stretching from Tehran to Beirut, and it is well on its way toward achieving that objective. The expansion of Iranian power is a mortal threat to Israel and a serious danger for other U.S. allies in the region.

Given the way that Moscow is collaborating with Tehran, Trump cannot be anti-Iran and pro-Russia. It’s a package deal—choose one or the other. The worry is that at Hamburg Trump may have chosen Russia.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

Must-Reads from Magazine

Robert Mueller’s special counsel’s office issues a series of indictments that establish the facts of Russia’s efforts to influence the political process in 2016, which are incontrovertible and disturbing but also objectively underwhelming. The COMMENTARY Podcast hosts explore the renewed debate over Russian meddling and the ongoing campaign to secure new gun laws in the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

Until recently, the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency seemed like an eerie mirror-image reflection of Barack Obama’s first year in office.

The election of a president who represented a radical departure from the status quo instantly reinvigorated the formerly moribund opposition. Energized activists descended on town halls, marched on Washington, organized at the grassroots level, and won elections—including a shocker of a Senate race in a state where they had no right being competitive. This energy has so intoxicated Democrats in Congress that they’ve marched vigorously down some legislative cul-de-sacs, which included holding the debt ceiling hostage and shutting down the government over a non-budgetary matter. These tactical errors were dismissed as meaningless in the long run. After all, we’d seen this movie before.

All that was missing from this analogy was an unpopular legislative achievement to hang around the governing party’s neck. Democrats seemed to have secured that last piece of the puzzle in the form of December’s tax-code reform bill. It was a bill passed by the Senate in a pre-dawn Saturday morning vote. There were no public hearings on the matter. It was a partisan bill crafted behind closed doors. It was riddled with carve-outs, giveaways, and loopholes that would explode the deficit. It was a Christmas gift to the wealthy that raised taxes on some middle-class taxpayers.

At least, that was how Democrats attacked this legislation. The response from Republicans to this challenge was virtual silence; they were busy crafting the bill, which is as much an exercise in good governance as it is in minimizing defections, and that often means keeping quiet amid private negotiations. Rather than sell the public on the merits of the bill, the president, too, stayed silent. The result of this dynamic was legislation that polled in the twenties. The public had fully bought the Democratic line.

Then something remarkable happened: the bill began to speak for itself.

In anticipation of the effects that the new tax law would have on their bottom lines and in response to an increasingly tight labor market, businesses large and small began reinvesting in their employees and the economy. First, a handful of firms announced substantial one-time bonuses for their employees. That handful soon became a cascade, and the number of beneficiaries surged into the millions.

The benefits didn’t end there. Some firms began providing their employees with increases in the funds they would match for their 401(k) plans. Major employers like Walmart and Wells Fargo announced minimum-wage hikes for their part-time employees—an outcome Democrats have long said was desirable but only achievable through coercion by the state.

Manufacturers that had off-shored production began announcing plans to repatriate that activity into the United States. Energy and telecom firms, which require long-term stability and massive infrastructure investments to draw a profit, announced capital investments in the billions. And much of this occurred before Americans saw the withholding amounts in their paychecks decrease by a few percentage points—a modest reminder that 2018’s income tax filing will hurt a little bit less than 2017’s.

None of this was supposed to happen; not according to Democrats, anyway. On the eve of the bill’s passage, polls showed that attacks on tax-code reform were working. In one survey, a majority said they thought their tax burden would increase as a result of this law. Why wouldn’t they? Democrats had repeatedly and falsely said as much. Other polls suggested that a majority believed that the benefits of this bill would go to the wealthy. Indeed, this preconception was supported by research contending that executives, managers, and shareholders would be the primary—though not exclusive—beneficiaries of the law.

That kind of circumspection was not a feature of overwrought Democratic attacks on the law. Nancy Pelosi invoked Viking hordes when she called the law a “plundering” and a “pillaging of the middle class.” Elizabeth Warren claimed the law was a “corruption” that “is hollowing out America’s middle class” and “tearing down our democracy.” It’s “a brazen move to rig our political system and our economy,” Jeff Merkley declared. “Crumbs,” said Richard Blumenthal of this “malicious, malign” bill. “Disgusting, disgusting outcome for millions of Americans who will suffer under this bill,” was all Mazie Hirono could muster.

Democrats have long known that the corporate tax code was an obstacle to economic activity. That’s why Barack Obama complained that “our current corporate tax system is outdated, unfair, and inefficient” in 2012. They knew—or, at least, they should have known—that injecting as much capital into the economy as corporate tax-code reform did would have positive knock-on effects. If anything, Democrats should have warned that creating incentives to this much economic activity amid almost full employment and near 3 percent GDP growth risks overheating the economy, which would result in inflation and spiking prices. Instead, they theatrically tore at their garments in disgust, setting their credibility on fire in the process.

Today, according to a poll conducted for the New York Times, a majority—51 percent—support the GOP’s tax code law, up from just 37 percent when it was passed. The great irony in all this is that it was the Democratic Party—not Republicans—who so successfully sold this bill. By setting expectations that could not be met, Democrats created the conditions by which the law could be seen as a success. Tax-code reform will not be the GOP’s ObamaCare.

Some on the right expect tax code to redound to the GOP’s benefit in November, but the economy had been performing on all cylinders before this law’s passage and without many indications that the governing party would get the credit. The GOP’s position in the polls has recovered since December, but this is a relative condition. What looked like an imminent extinction-level event that would cleanse the landscape of Republicans now appears to be a run-of-the-mill tsunami. If that holds, the 2018 election will not be a referendum on the economy, but values—both those of the president and the party he is transforming—and, on that score, the Republican Party will take the hit they deserve.

And yet, this episode is an indication that Democratic imprudence can still steal defeat from the jaws of victory. Moreover, if the GOP endures a wipeout, it can trade on the tax-code bill and the trust the party gained from a successful legislative reform that was flagrantly mischaracterized by its opponents. That will be a strong argument in favor Republican governance ahead of 2020. They’re going to need it.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

In the late 1980s, numerous colleges and universities designed and adopted speech codes to curtail racist and other discriminatory speech. You can’t say they weren’t provoked. The University of Michigan, for example, adopted its code in the wake of a number of incidents including the distribution of fliers peppered with disgusting racial slurs that declared an “open season” on blacks. But at least at public universities, which must respect the First Amendment as agents of the state, these speech codes have been constitutional losers.

According toErwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, “every court to consider such a hate speech code declared it to be unconstitutional.” Such codes cannot, it seems, be drawn narrowly enough to avoid encroaching on constitutionally protected speech. The University of Michigan, for example, resolved a complaint against a student who had said of a class that “he had heard that minorities had a difficult time in the course and that he had heard that they were not treated fairly.” The professor in the class, a member of a minority group, filed the complaint on the grounds that the student’s speech might undermine her tenure case.

This example of overbreadth is not only a reason why the code was struck down in Doe v. University of Michigan (1989). It does, however, suggest that speech codes are often deployed against people who are not engaged in even mildly offensive speech, let alone harassment. That, coupled with the absence of proof that speech codes are effective at addressing the discrimination they purport to address, should have killed them long ago. Yet both public and private universities continue to maintain policies on speech that do not pass the First Amendment laugh test.

Consider Kentucky State University, whose speech code is the “Speech Code of the Month” for the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Kentucky State’s Student Code of Conduct, reasonably enough, concerns itself with “offenses against persons,” including “any contact or communication that threatens, harasses, or injures a person.” But listed among the example of such offenses, along with “physical assault,” “coercion,” and “threats,” is “embarrassment.” Yes, really. As FIRE says, it appears that a student at Kentucky State University “can face disciplinary action for embarrassing another person.” That certainly would seem to “directly [affect] students’ ability to engage in unfettered, free-wheeling debate and argument on important political and social issues.” I suppose, in theory, it directly affects their ability to point out the schmutz on a classmate’s shirt.

It is hard to imagine that this code is enforced, so we need not tremble for the right of students to poke fun at each other at KSU. But the persistence of codes like KSU’s in the face of clear guidance from courts regarding their unconstitutionality, and in the absence of evidence that they do more good than harm, is a mystery. Are those who devise such codes ignorant of the law and of their record? Or do they stick with them because they are willing to risk legal challenge and their reputations only to appear to be on the right side of history concerning prejudice?

Either way—and I can say this because I am not subject to KSU’s student code of conduct—KSU’s leaders deserve to be embarrassed.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

Donald Trump traveled to Florida on Friday at the end of a nightmarish week for the nation. The shooting deaths of 17 people, many of them teenagers, has sent the nation reeling into an increasingly routinized cycle of grievance and recrimination. The familiar debate over what federal response, if any, could have prevented this atrocity or interdict future episodes of mass violence has, however, largely bypassed the president. Trump tweeted condolences, and he briefly addressed the nation, but his presence in the post-Parkland shooting national debate was almost apparitional. The response to this event has largely focused on the Republican majority in Congress. That is instructive; after a year of near ubiquity, Donald Trump might be relinquishing the hold he has had on the national imagination.

For example, this should not have been a great week for the president.

The Mueller probe is back in the news. This week, Rick Gates, a former senior advisor to Trump’s 2016 campaign, began finalizing a plea deal—making him the third former campaign official to cooperate with the special counsel probe into Russian meddling in the campaign. On Friday, Mueller’s office announced the indictment of 13 Russians and 3 Russian “entities” that allegedly worked on the campaign’s behalf. The indictment alleged that these agents communicated with “unwitting” elements of the Trump campaign’s structure to coordinate political activities.

The scandal involving Rob Porter, the former West Wing staffer who was credibly alleged to have verbally and physically abused women, entered its second week. New revelations in that scandal suggest that senior White House staff were aware of the allegations against Porter for months and covered them up.

Elsewhere in Washington, administration head David Shulkin’s chief of staff was alleged by the inspector general’s office to have falsified email records and made false statements to justify using government funds for the personal use of the secretary’s wife. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has had to explain why he spent vast sums of taxpayer dollars on extravagant flight accommodations—even quick trips between Washington D.C. and New York City. The explanation he settled on is that he has had several frightening encounters with the general public, the avoidance of which necessitated first-class upgrades. In Congress, Donald Trump’s preferred immigration compromise went down in flames. It garnered just 39 votes in the Senate of the 60 needed to pass, losing the support of 14 Republicans in the process.

Finally, this week saw the reinvigoration of stories involving Donald Trump’s serial lechery. Amid an FEC inquiry, Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, admitted that he paid the adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 from his personal accounts to keep her quiet about the alleged affair she had with the president. Daniels has said the admission has invalidated a non-disclosure agreement and will now tell all. Before she had the chance, though, another story broke involving Trump’s alleged involvement with an adult model: Karen McDougal. That story, however, is less about the affair than the National Enquirer’s efforts to keep damaging news about Trump from gracing their front pages.

This rough week for Trump was not, however, all that different from the last rough week for Trump.

By this time last week, the president was taking personal ownership of Porter’s scandalous conduct and his administration’s attempts to shield him from the consequences of his actions. Amid reports that Chief of Staff John Kelly and Communications Director Hope Hicks had misled the president, and Kelly was prepared to resign over it, Trump heaped praise on the alleged wife beater, wished him well, and attacked the #MeToo movement. Hours earlier, the president had signed the Tea Party’s death certificate in the form of a two-year budget deal that added hundreds of billions to the deficit after the government shut down for the second time in as many months.

None of this seems to have had much of an impact on Donald Trump’s standing in the polls. According to the Real Clear Politics average of the president’s job approval ratings, Donald Trump is now just 11 points underwater with approximately 42 percent of the public approving of the job he’s doing in office and 53 percent disapproving. That might not sound like great shakes, but everything is relative. Trump is currently in the best position he’s seen since May of last year, down from nearly 21 points underwater in December.

Early last week, the Weekly Standard’s David Byler suggested this rebound is due to a combination of a variety of factors. The president’s ability to avoid igniting a Twitter controversy and the passage of the tax code reform bill, which brought frustrated Republican voters back into the fold, were perhaps the most significant contributors. The president’s decision to court controversy last week by heaping scorn on the #MeToo movement while standing behind his alleged batterer of a staffer suggests that presidential silence isn’t as much of a factor in Trump’s rebound as previously believed. In the week that elapsed since he made those comments, Trump’s job approval has maintained its general upward trajectory.

We’re left to conclude that poll respondents are beginning to tune out the stuff that dominates political media. For months, Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans managed to avoid any credit for the state of the economy. It is possible that passage of the tax code reform law has allowed Republicans in Washington to take ownership of the economy in voters’ minds. That also diminishes Trump’s role in affairs. For Republican voters, in particular, scandals involving the embrace of wife-beating staffers, adultery and hush money, and attacks on a movement dedicated to justice for abused women don’t have the effect on Trump’s polling they once did because Trump doesn’t loom as large in their minds anymore.

The president’s support of a credibly accused child abuser in his campaign for the U.S. Senate and his tortured effort to absolve violent white nationalists of exclusive culpability for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, had dramatic negative effects on Trump’s polling. That was not because those events were especially repulsive to voters, though they were that, but because they led to schisms within the GOP. An unambiguously well-received legislative achievement seems to have upended that dynamic and convinced Republican voters to come “home” to Trump. At least, for now, they’re not going anywhere.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

Americans no longer have the luxury of throwing up their hands in frustration over the confused situation on the ground in Syria. As the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov demonstrated, unpacking the bewildering complexity of the conditions that prevail on the ground now that the ISIS threat has receded leaves observers with the terrifying realization that great power conflict is not so difficult to imagine.

In the last week alone, according to Trofimov, Damascus looked the other way to allow U.S.-backed Kurdish proxies to fight forces loyal to Turkey, another American ally. That conflict is leading Turkey to threaten American troops, who are supporting Kurdish forces in an advisory capacity, raising the specter of armed conflict between two NATO allies. At the same time, the Syrian regime targeted a U.S.-held position in another part of the country, which led the U.S. to execute retaliatory strikes on those pro-regime forces—strikes that killed at least 100 pro-Syrian proxies and Syrian soldiers and a substantial number of Russian contractors. This is to say nothing of the increasingly hot war between Israeli forces and Iranian assets taking place in and over Syrian territory.

The situation in Syria is moving so fast that the article Trofimov published at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday was dated within hours of its publication. He noted that Moscow has remained “determinedly silent” over reports that American firepower killed a significant number of Russian civilians performing combat roles in a theater of war, even though reports indicated that those casualties were being treated in Ministry of Defense hospitals. Russia’s RIA news agency went so far as to call reports of hundreds of Russian casualties “classic disinformation.” Moscow’s caution has since disappeared.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed that a U.S. strike in the eastern Deir el-Zour province killed five Russian civilians. Informal estimates suggest the Russian death toll could be as high as 300. The formal acknowledgment that Russians died amid a barrage of American bombs represents a shift in Moscow’s tone and introduces a dangerously unpredictable political element to what was previously a tightly controlled dynamic.

The U.S.-Russian relationship in Syria has been a frosty one that had its share of risks. Russia’s direct intervention in the Syrian civil war began with strikes on anti-Assad militias covertly supported by the West and on the CIA-provided weapons depots that supplied them. Those strikes exposed to the world what had previously been a black program. Russian fighters have routinely harassed U.S. jets and unmanned aerial vehicles and invaded NATO airspace—a pattern that culminated in the downing of a Russian warplane over Turkish soil in the autumn of 2015. Meanwhile, Syrian insurgents have been filmed destroying Russian armor and helicopters using sophisticated U.S. weaponry.

As both Russian and American direct involvement in Syria has deepened and mutual hostility intensified, so, too, has the danger. In July 2016, Russian aircraft targeted a base of operations used to train anti-Assad rebel forces, which had only been evacuated by U.S. and British Special Forces 24 hours before it was destroyed. Four days later, Russian warplanes razed a CIA facility near the Jordanian border that housed the families of rebel soldiers. In March of last year, Russian and Syrian air assets targeted U.S.-backed Syrian Arab Coalition fighters in the town of Al-Bab, raining ordnance down on positions just three kilometers away from where U.S. commandos were located.

It’s a small consolation that both sides of this conflict were once committed to denying that they were prosecuting a proxy war against each other. That comforting fiction is, apparently, no longer operative. Moscow’s decision to admit that American forces are directly responsible for Russian deaths adds an element of volatility to an already tense situation. If roles were reversed, it’s hardly inconceivable that the American public would demand a response to that kind of Russian aggression. Nor is it difficult to foresee a scenario in which Russia’s political leaders see political utility in banging the drum over America’s unchecked recklessness and hostility in Syria. Once that dynamic sets in, there’s no telling where and how it ends.

Every nation with forces on the ground or in the skies over Syria has interests in that country that are regarded as vital. Those nations have sunk costs into the preservation of those interests, and that investment is not going to be abandoned any time soon. The prospect of an accidental engagement between two nations with conflicting interests cannot be dismissed. If such a clash were to occur, the mechanisms by which it might be defused and tensions resolved are untested and could fail. The result could be a cascading series of disproportionate escalations—a cycle from which there is no face-saving way out. That is the stuff of nightmares.

Americans and Russians are now shooting at one another on faraway battlefields—a fateful situation that representatives of both nations have desperately sought to avoid. We can only hope that everyone recognizes the terrible danger of the game they’re playing.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.